Monsieur Jausion winked to the clerk. "Into this house, then?" he asked in a caressing voice, while the clerk seated himself on the bench near the stove and wrote in a crouching position.
Clarissa continued in the same plaintive whisper: "I opened the door of this room. Somebody seized me by the arm and led me into the alcove. He enjoined me to be silent. It was Bastide Grammont."
At last the name! But how different it was to pronounce it than merely to think it! Clarissa paused, while she closed her eyes and elapsed her hands convulsively. "After leaving me alone a while," she resumed as if speaking in her sleep, "he returned, bade me follow him and led me into the street. There he stood still and asked whether I knew him. I first said yes, then no. Thereupon he asked me if I had seen anything, and I said no. 'Go away!' he ordered, and I went. But I had not reached the centre of the town when he was again at my side and took my hand in his. 'I am not one of the murderers,' he protested, 'I met you and my only object was to save you. Swear that you will remain silent, swear on your father's life.' I swore, whereupon he left me. And that is all."
Monsieur Jausion smiled skeptically. "You claim, Madame, to have fled in here from the street," he remarked, "but it has been established by unexceptionable testimony that the gate was locked from eight o'clock on. How do you explain that?"
Clarissa remained mute, even her breath seemed to stop. The Prefect motioned to Monsieur Jausion to desist; for the present enough had been attained, it was enough that Bastide Grammont had been recognized by Clarissa. The resolve to force the criminal, who denied all share in the guilt, to a confession by having him unexpectedly confront the witness, came as a matter of course.
The gentlemen led Clarissa to the carriage, as she was scarcely able to walk. At home she lapsed into a peculiar state. First she lay back lethargically in a chair; suddenly she sprang up and cried: "Take away the murderers!" The door opened and the terrified face of a servant appeared in the crack. All the domestics stood waiting in the hall, most of them resolved to leave the President's service. Clarissa saw herself deprived of all the protection of love, and cast out from the circle where birth is respected and binding forms are recognized as the least of duties. She was exposed to every eye, the boldest gaze could pry into her inmost soul, she had become a public object, nothing about her was any longer her own, she herself could no longer find herself, find anything in herself upon which she could lean, she was branded, without and within, food for the general prurience, tossed defenselessly upon the filthy floods of gossip, the centre of a fearful occurrence from which she could no more dissever her thoughts. Sadness, grief, anxiety, scorn, these were no longer feelings for her, her blood coursed too wildly for that; uncertainty of herself dominated her, doubts as to her perception, doubts as to visible things in general; and now and then she would prick her finger with a needle just to feel the pain, which would serve as evidence of her being awake and might preserve her heart from decay. Added to this, the torment she suffered from the intrusive: appeals to tell the truth, the jeers from below, the command from above, the thirst for revenge and the ineffaceableness of a word once spoken; lastly, she saw the whole world filled with red tongues, ceaselessly chattering; bloody tongues with snakelike movements, directed toward her; every object she touched turned into a slippery tongue. Human countenances grew dim, save one, which, despite guilt and condemnation, was enthroned, in heroic suffering, high above the others, nay, appeared preeminent through his guilt as well as his defiance. And the day she was told that she was to confront Bastide Grammont in order to accuse him, her pulses beat in joyous measure again for the first time, and she arrayed herself as if for a festival.
The meeting was to take place in the magistrate's office. Besides Monsieur Jausion and his clerks, Counselor Pinaud, who had returned, was present. Monsieur Jausion cast a malicious glance at him over his spectacles as Clarissa Mirabel, decked in lace, rustled in, bowed smiling to the gentlemen, and then swept her gaze with cheerful calmness over the inhospitable room. From a frame in the centre of the wall the fat and ill-humored face of the King looked down upon her, as ill-humored as if each one of his subjects were especially repugnant to him. She forgot that it was only a picture that hung before her and looked up with a coquettish pout.
The magistrate made a sign, a side-door was thrown open, and Bastide Grammont, with hands chained together and with an officer of justice on either side of him, walked in. Clarissa gave a low cry and her face turned livid.
Prison atmosphere enveloped Bastide. The shaggy hair, the long, neglected beard, the staring, somewhat dazed look, the slight stoop, as of a carrier of burdens, of the gigantic form, the secretly quivering wrath upon his newly furrowed brow—all proclaimed their cause and origin. Yes, he seemed to carry about him the invisible walls which filled him with agony and gloom, and which, month after month, pictured to him with more and more hopeless brilliance the images of freedom, until finally they refused to delude him with blooming tree or flourishing field; then they resembled the desolate gray of an autumn evening, when the air already smacks of winter, the hearse rattles oftener than usual past the garden-gate toward the little churchyard, and the rising half-moon floats in glowing radiance in the misty azure like a bleeding, divided heart.
And yet that haughty eye, in which shone the resolve to be true to himself? And yet that strangely bitter scorn in his mien which might be compared to the cautious and at the same time majestic crouching of a tiger cat? The infinite contempt with which he looked at the hands of the clerks, prepared to write, his inner freedom and grand detachment in spite of the handcuffs and the two soldiers?